“AT THE HEART of Christian message stands the person of Christ, who is ‘the image of the unseen God’ (Col 1:15), and he ‘has become our wisdom, and our virtue, and our holiness, and our freedom’ (1 Cor 1:31). Jaki makes it clear that ‘the Christian certitude about the rationality of nature, about man’s ability to investigate its laws, owes its vigour to the concreteness by which Christ radiated the features of God creating through the fullness of rationality which is love.’[13] Christian rationality was something very different from the Greek variety, for the Greeks tended either to extreme mechanism or to pan-teleologism (the stance which saw purpose everywhere). From Socrates onwards, it was the problem of pan-teleologism which prevailed, bringing with it a cosmology which was ‘a mixture of rank subjectivism and inescapable determinism’. Lacking in the Greek conception of the rationality of the cosmos was an understanding of the freedom of man and the contingency of things. ‘Conviction on both points was secured only by Christianity for which the freedom of man is an indispensable tenet,’ as is also ‘the contingency of a world which is created.’[14]
According to Jaki, the crucial contribution of the New Testament to the doctrine of creation is pivoted in the efforts of John and Paul to safeguard monotheism by attributing to Christ the work of creation, a work most specifically tied to the Father in the Old Testament. Such is the gist of his quoting St. John’s portrayal of Christ in whom ‘all beings came to be; not one being had its being but through him’ (Jn 1:3). The same is true of his quoting Paul: ‘For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth: everything visible and invisible; . . . all things were created through him and for him’ (Col 1:16). This notion of creation through Christ eliminated the specter of a duality between the Father and the Son while the portrayal, specific to John, of Christ as the ‘only-begotten Son,’ posed a powerful barrier within Christianity to those inroads which pantheism made within other forms of monotheism.”
—Paul Haffner: Creation and Scientific Creativity: A Study in the Thought of S.L. Jaki, Chap. 4. (Christendom Press; 1991)
